Salt on the Wound
by TheDarkFlygon
Summary: Good news: Paraskevi didn't seem to have a type of Post-GUILT Syndrome attached to it. Bad news: Kyriaki still had one.


Good news: Paraskevi didn't seem to have a type of Post-GUILT Syndrome attached to it.

Bad news: Kyriaki still had one.

GUILT was a weird little thing, when you thought about it. As a human-made disease, a weapon of sorts, it had unnatural mutation patterns and was difficult to grasp. Some strains of GUILT had PGS cases developing afterwards, some didn't. Linda Reid's did, Amy Chaser's didn't. Cybil Myers's didn't, John Matthews's did. It was only a part of the GUILT cases ever registered which caused it, thankfully. It barely made sense, but one with a semblance of sanity or empathy would have said "thank Asclepius for that".

Now, if only Kyriaki didn't have a PGS attached to it, he'd have been _much_ better off.

Was Derek a responsible surgeon who cared about his patients, assisting nurse and job? Of course. He'd save the world from GUILT again if it needed his help doing so. He'd wake up at three in the morning to operate on a patient if that was needed. He'd barely escape from death's grasp yet again if it meant saving someone, he really would. (It wasn't like he hadn't done that before: this patient with the contagious Tetarti case should have fazed him much more than that, three years ago.)

Yet, was he a responsible human being who had the humbleness to admit when he wasn't in that great of a shape? Apparently, no, as he was absolutely terrible at even admitting to himself there was something wrong in the first place.

He himself was a _special_ case of ex-GUILT patient, which was why he should have thought to being careful much earlier than when he suspected he may have gotten himself in some deep, deeper troubles. Never had anyone heard of someone spontaneously hosting two different strains of the toxin at the same time, resulting in him getting a double infection and, well, almost dying because of said infection. Not exactly what he'd have defined as having a great time, back there.

Why is why Derek was so relieved when Paraskevi seemed to not be able to develop some kind of PGS attached to its name, already picturing having bits of the Arrow to the Heart shoved in, well… his heart. The nickname was explicit enough for him not to have to do the job of explaining where he had gotten infected and why it had been so important to remove the two strains in one go and rapidly. Thank Asclepius Naomi Kimishima had been there to operate on him in time and save him from the clutch of death.

But you knew who just happened to not be there to take care of the little issue Kyriaki caused in some of its former hosts? Naomi Kimishima.

It all started a few days ago. After a day of saving lives from PGS and some other, more benign cases, he had started to feel some light pains in his chest. It wasn't anything big at first: he, stupidly, brushed it as him having used his arms for too long in similar position, which fatigued his muscles and lead him to have a bit of a sore feeling on his chest. It really wasn't much, nothing to worry about, right? Yeah, sure, he could have still told himself that and try to remain blissfully unaware of how abominably dumb he had been on that.

Obviously, when the pain became constant and, most importantly, started to ache when he was operating on someone, it started to become an issue. Trying to find a reason, he couldn't put it on fatigue anymore, or else it was an organ of his chest getting strained and, well, he didn't really want that, didn't he? He checked his surgery scar from a few years ago: nothing. _Nothing_ was out of the ordinary, it had recovered smoothly since then, there was _nothing_ weird with anything except for the pain near his heart.

Perhaps he should have seen it coming, in hindsight.

Three years seemed to be a while ago when Derek tried to do what he had done when he was actively infected and contagious: focus when his chest felt like it was on fire. From a day to the other, the pain went from annoying but somewhat tolerable to unbearable, flaring like a Molotov cocktail exploding inside his ribcage. That clearly wasn't normal, especially since he had never heard of a heart disease he could have gotten except for his now-infamous GUILT infection…

Really, how did he have not seen it coming? It was so goddamn obvious; how could it have slipped for so long under his nose! (A day is long, for a surgeon).

It was a protocol procedure, something so easy he would have sworn he could do it with his eyes closed and under a blindfold. After having operated in the least friendly of conditions, it was simply just very easy to take care of. Perhaps he had been too pompous to think he was just going to be able to zoom his way through it, Mister Healing Touch over there, Angie's scolds coming to his mind as he thought about it. Heh, she hadn't been wrong to ask him if he was able to operate on that day.

The patient himself was no issue. Relatively healthy body whose appendix had burst into flames, a case of appendicitis treated just in time. Caduceus just happened to be the one hospital that was the closest to this man's workplace. There were no complications with the operation either, everything was going smoothly for such a late-blooming appendicitis, never causing him to wonder if he was going to be able to save this man's life. It seemed all so smooth, all so simple, that he could have done it within minutes… if it wasn't for the bleeding pain in his chest.

Angie knew, he was certain of that, that his pretexts were only that: pretexts. Lies. Half-truths meant to soften the stone-hard reality. Derek had never been a liar, except on some select times like that damn time where he had contracted GUILT and tried not to worry his dear nurse about his worsening condition. She knew he was cringing on the inside, clutching his teeth to retain moans of pain and grunts every time he even slightly hung over a part of the body, resulting in his chest moving. He was now sure the patient's appendix wasn't the only thing on the verge of busting in the OR.

And yet, he had sustained the pain until the man was all good, stitched up and bandaged. The operation was all good and neatly folded. His nurse exhaled a sigh of relief as staff wheeled the patient out of the room and to the awakening wing. Oh, good, that was done, he could now go back to… Oh wait…

His legs buckled up under his weight, giving up on him, weakened by having to be tensed for a while as he operated. His focus broken, the pain came back, biting into his heart like a lioness into her prey, blurring his vision with tears until, in his inevitable fall, his glasses fell off the bridge of his nose and clicked into the floor, unbroken, unlike him and his attempt to get his hand back onto them, hand weakly extended as another clutched desperately at his scrubs, as if that was going to calm anything down. Pathetic, utterly pathetic.

"Derek?!" Angie's voice screamed near him as she kneeled right next to his lead weight of a body. "Oh my God, what's wrong?!"

"Ugh… Ngh… P… PGS…" was all that came out of his mouth before the scream he had tried to keep inside for the past hour finally exited his throat for the world to have the displeasure of hearing.

And as suddenly as the pain took over his conscience, from his thoughts to his gestures, the world turned black, senseless and painless. There it was: the state where he felt nothing. Death, perhaps.

…

That… maybe was why he was so surprised to wake up.

Derek had operated enough times on PGS to think his case was too late to be saved. Considering what the syndrome caused in the organs it affected, his heart was, in his mind, already unsalvageable. Also considering how rare were viable hearts for transplants, even in this day and age, it'd have been a journey to the end of the ever-lasting night to find a potential donor in time.

He had also almost died enough times for him to know Angie was going to scold him again. Unsurprisingly, it _also_ turned out to be false.

When he woke up, everything was blurry because, duh, he wasn't wearing his glasses. He, however, didn't expect for them to softly and magically appear on his face, courtesy of the first face he saw upon regaining consciousness: his fellow nurse and assistant. Her face was covered in bittersweet, one part happy and one part pained or saddened, both mixing to become an expression he wasn't sure he had ever wanted to see. He could still tell there had been a tear running down her cheek at one point. Ah, poor girl… He had made her worry for him again, hadn't he?

The anaesthesia hadn't fully run out of his body yet, a thing he realized as he tried to smile to her and only getting a small inclination of his lips as a result. It seemed to be enough for her to look a bit happier, though, so job well done he supposed.

The conversation they had afterwards was slow and uneventful, the mist of post-surgery fatigue making his brain heavily inefficient for socializing. The most he realized was how much he should have not survived to this mess.

Truly, how much people had survived toxicosis and tumours to the heart? One, as much as he was concerned. He simply hoped nobody else had gone through this ordeal…

Bad news: Kyriaki still had a PGS type attached to it.

Good news: at least, this was fixable.


End file.
